The knowledge is born of curiosity, curiosity being the daughter of doubt, the awareness that we know nothing (or little) about the world around us or that could surround us. It is for all this that we continue to be amazed and to search around us for these elements.
There are also discoveries that are the fruit of mere chance, but as Virgil said in The Aeneid: «audentes fortuna iuvat» (fortune smiles on the bold).
Great changes and discoveries can occur while we are lying on the couch, as long as we are able to fly curiously in other skies, with our wonderful minds without limits. We can be daring and audacious without leaving the four walls of our home.
The mentally lazy, no matter how much he shakes, will not come across any new ideas or good opportunities. Neither will the mental parasite or the unproductive clever. It does not depend on power, money or position on a supposed social scale: the mental arid ones do not bear fruit, at most they repeat hackneyed ideas, vomit slogans without the slightest hint of criticism or self-criticism.
This lysergic intipit should not presage an ode to the mad chemical travels of Hunter S. Thompson, but something much more daily, earthly, almost bourgeois, I would say.
The long weeks we have spent locked up in our homes, the nights and days equal to each other without solution of continuity, have been a fantastic opportunity to explore us and think, reflect, observe and, therefore, doubt.
Thus, we have realised some aspects that would deserve an amendment to the whole or, at least, a renewed direction.
If we talk about the ecosystem in which we live as citizens, it is good and necessary to share the doubts and conclusions we have reached.
Immersed in the swampy principle of post-COVID-19, still knocked out by the gales of the pandemic, we realise that the rucksack we carry as citizens is too heavy to cross the quicksand that awaits us.
In the face of the onslaught of health emergencies, the welfare state has faltered and continues to tremble, but at least we have understood that a country must ensure certain essential services in an impeccable manner.
Going down a little more to the detail of the subject, we have understood that our taxes, the fruit of our work, must pay for a proper health system, as well as a valid public education offer of good level and, of course, citizen security.
There is no room for selfishness in this regard. We will always be proud to contribute to this.
However, in the opposite sense, superfluous structures and functions that consume resources without playing an essential or at least relevant role for citizens are becoming evident.
A few years ago in Italy, under the government led by Matteo Renzi, the brilliant (and implacable) economist Carlo Cottarelli led the commission for the spending review, a non-partisan group of experts who identified, by government mandate, the pockets of unnecessary public spending.
It was probably the most interesting concrete policy initiative of the last decade.
Just when they were about to take the consequent cutbacks, the Renzi government fell precipitously and all the work done was parked in the attics of some ministry and relegated to one more anecdote.
In the face of the looming economic crisis, the idea of carrying out in Spain, and where necessary, the revision of everything superfluous, unproductive public spending, dysfunctional or directly sterile administrative flourishes, becomes powerful.
There is no tax increase that can stand up to the enormous float of hypertrophic and unweighted public spending.
Reflection should reach the central and regional chambers, so that they begin to doubt the usefulness of verbiage, of legislative incontinence that complicates, rather than simplifies, the lives of citizens both in their private environment and in their business activities. Savings are also possible in the regulatory sense.
Less is going to be more, in many areas, in this new normality that awaits us with open arms.
Marco Bolognini
Lawyer. Founder of Maio Legal and partner responsible for the areas of Corporate/M&A and banking. President of Globalaw Ltd. (2017-2019), president of Globalaw Foundation and chair of Globalaw’s CSR committee. Columnist of the newspaper Expansión. Also writes in his blog Mínima Inmoralia.